Chapter 5 | Section 2
The Boomer Movement and David Payne’s Illegal Invasions
Following the Civil War, the federal government made new treaties with Native nations who had supported the Confederacy, contending that they had forfeited their rights and land claims under the old treaties when they joined the Confederacy. As a result, the Unassigned Lands, around 2 million acres in the center of Indian Territory, were removed from all Native nations. In February 1879, Cherokee politician Elias Boudinot published a letter in the Chicago Times promoting the Unassigned Lands as open to settlement. Inspired by Boudinot’s message, many squatters and would-be settlers believed that the Homestead Act entitled each of them to 160 acres of land. When federal officials confirmed that Boudinot’s letter was inaccurate, the majority of squatters left. However, some squatters based in Kansas continued to enter the territory and establish boomer colonies before the lands were officially opened to settlement.
David L. Payne and William Couch and others established the largest of the boomer colonies. It comprised some 14,000 colonists and was located in Wichita, Kansas. Most of the participants were white US citizens from Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas. Their movement focused on the Unassigned Lands and later the Cherokee Outlet. They embraced populist impulses but assumed that the federal government would open lands to non-Native homesteading. Payne and other boomer leaders invaded the Unassigned Lands several times and established illegal settlements. They were arrested by US soldiers multiple times and taken to Fort Reno for squatting on land illegally near what would become Oklahoma City. Couch led four intrusions, including one in midwinter 1884 to the site of present-day Stillwater. Once again, the US Army arrested the boomers and drove them back to Kansas.
This photo depicts families settled at a Boomer camp near Arkansas City, Kansas, around the 1880s.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
In the summer of 1884, Payne and the boomers established a settlement at Rock Falls in the Cherokee Outlet, just four miles south of Kansas in present-day Kay County. Their large squatter camp consisted of some two thousand people. They planned to establish a town at the site, only to have federal troops burn their camp down.
Some boomer colonies were successful, however. Among them were the South Canadian Colony, a strip of the South Canadian River Valley farmed by African Americans between 1886 and 1889, the in southwestern Indian Territory, and the Mountain View colony, which was established as a town by 1895 and located between the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservations.
What is the connection between the boomer movement and Manifest Destiny? If anything, Payne and the boomers viewed the federal lands in the Unassigned Lands and the Cherokee Outlet as public lands subject to the Homestead Act and therefore available to squatters and homesteaders. In 1890, Congress created Oklahoma Territory from the western portion of Indian Territory. In the spirit of Manifest Destiny, the Oklahoma territorial government gained expanded authority over the people and the land. In this sense, Manifest Destiny (see chapter 4), the belief that the United States had a God-given right to expand its influence and reach throughout the American West, including Indian Territory, chipped away at tribal sovereignty. For Native peoples in the territory, this meant the steady loss of tribal sovereignty. For boomers, the new policies meant that the federal lands should be released to squatters and homesteaders.
The Homestead Act and Land Openings
The campaign to open lands in Indian Territory to non-Natives began in the 1870s and 1880s, and resulted in the land run of 1889. As noted earlier, the central part of Indian Territory was known as the Unassigned Lands. These had been lands held by the Muscogee Nation and Seminole Nation from the early 1830s until the Reconstruction Treaties of 1866. The Homestead Act of 1862 first became active in Oklahoma when the federal government opened the Unassigned Lands for settlement on April 22, 1889. A series of land runs continued in the western part of Oklahoma until 1895. By 1905 all “surplus” Native land holdings had been placed in the public domain, meaning that they belonged to the federal government and were open to settlement.
Oklahoma land openings, 1891–1906. Land openings in Oklahoma Territory took place between 1889 and 1906. In the land runs, individuals competed for land claims and had to register and improve the land in order to own and retain the property. Other lands were opened by lottery or sealed bid.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Government policies such as the Homestead Act encouraged Black and white migration to Indian Territory and to other places in the American West. Settlers—men and women over the age of 21—could now claim their 160 acres across wider areas. Public domain lands were also granted to railroads or purchased for speculative purposes.
Unassigned Lands
Three weeks into his presidency, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation declaring that the Unassigned Lands as public lands would be open to settlement beginning April 22, 1889.
Railroad companies and hopeful homesteaders supported the opening of the Unassigned Lands. In contrast, many government leaders of the Five Tribes as well as large-scale cattle ranchers opposed it. The federal government organized two districts with land offices, one in Kingfisher and one in Guthrie, to handle land claims. In addition, the town sites of Norman and Oklahoma (future Oklahoma City) were created. Cavalry patrolled the boundaries of the lands and arrested many “sooners” who illegally entered the area ahead of time.
On March 23, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison signed a proclamation declaring that 2 million acres in present-day Oklahoma were open for settlement. Earlier in 1889, when Congress met, Illinois representative William M. Springer had amended the Indian Appropriations Bill, authorizing the president to proclaim the “Unassigned Lands” open to non-Native settlement. The president’s proclamation led to the Land Run of 1889 less than one month later. This photo depicts people waiting for the land opening at Buffalo Springs.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
For three days prior to the declared opening, prospective homesteaders gathered along the north, south, and west borders of the Unassigned Lands. At noon on April 22 they waited for the signal to stake their claims. Those making the run crossed into the Unassigned Lands looking for boundary markers made by government surveyors that identified specific locations by name. They took the information from the markers to the land office and completed the required paperwork under the Homestead Act.
Oklahoma Territory
In May 1890, Congress passed the Organic Act, which established what had been the western portion of Indian Territory as Oklahoma Territory. The town of Guthrie became the capital of Oklahoma Territory. President Harrison appointed a governor, secretary, three federal judges, and a marshal for Oklahoma Territory. Elections were held for the territorial legislature, and Republicans held a thin majority over Democrats, with some Populists, in both the council (Senate) and the assembly (House of Representatives). Populists were a third party during this time period with strong agricultural support and a reform-minded platform. Oklahoma Territory held political and economic opportunities for Blacks and whites. At the same time, racial segregation and other forms of social control were intensifying in the 1890s. In 1897, public schools, which had previously taught all students, were segregated, meaning children attended either all-Black or all-white schools. Many Native American children in Oklahoma Territory attended boarding schools.
To accommodate territorial growth, the Organic Act provided that all reservations in western Indian Territory, including Osage, Kaw, Ponca, Pawnee, Wichita-Caddo, Kiowa-Comanche-Apache, and Cheyenne-Arapaho reservations, would automatically become part of Oklahoma Territory. The act also authorized the president to appoint commissioners to negotiate with western tribes to open their surplus lands for non-Native settlement. The negotiators as a group became known as the Jerome Commission, and for five years they negotiated with tribal leaders to assign allotments to every man, woman, and child on official tribal rolls. The federal government purchased surplus land and opened it to homesteading through land runs and lotteries. As a result, over the next seventeen years, the population of Oklahoma Territory increased from roughly 60,400 in 1890 to 722,400 in 1907. Indian Territory to the east remained under a combination of federal and tribal authority until 1907, when it joined Oklahoma Territory to become the state of Oklahoma.
Cherokee Outlet
Four more land runs took place in Oklahoma Territory in the early 1890s, including the rush for land in the Cherokee Outlet, the fourth and largest land run. On September 16, 1893, 100,000 people lined its borders, many who lived in the boomer camps in Kansas, ready to stake a claim. The Cherokee Outlet, 6 million acres of land located along the border with Kansas in northern Indian Territory, had remained Cherokee property long after the Reconstruction Treaties of 1866.
The land was not easy to access. The federal government placed other tribes along the Arkansas River, creating distance between the Outlet and the Cherokee Nation. By the late 1870s, enterprising Cherokees were cashing in on the burgeoning cattle trade by assessing taxes in the form of grazing fees. Tribal members formed the Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association in 1883 to protect themselves, to assist one another in roundups and brandings, and to inspect cattle. And the organization became very powerful. For example, in the summer of 1884 the association closed cattle trails between Texas and Kansas with wire fences and had armed cowboys keep intruders off its members’ leased lands.
Land run participants in 1893 waiting for the start of the Cherokee Outlet Opening, the fourth and largest land run.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
President Harrison proclaimed that the Cherokee Nation had no legal right to lease Cherokee Outlet lands and declared their agreement with the livestock association to be null and void. Harrison ordered all livestock removed from the Outlet.
Just six months earlier, the Cherokee National Council had agreed to lease the Cherokee Outlet to the Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association for another five years, a lucrative deal with the cattle ranchers paying $200,000 annually for grazing rights. Yet by the end of 1891, under pressure from the federal government, the Cherokee Nation agreed to cede the Outlet to the United States for $1.40 an acre. Cherokee leaders had a clause in the cession agreement stipulating that the federal government would assist the tribe in removing trespassers, or unauthorized non-Native people, from Cherokee Nation land. The federal government did not uphold this commitment, however. Some seventy years later, in 1961, the Indian Claims Commission awarded $14 million to the Cherokee Nation in a suit against the United States. The commission found that President Harrison had no legal right to void the Cherokee Outlet lease and that Cherokee Nation citizens involved in the negotiations in the early 1890s had done so under duress.
A general store in Taloga, Oklahoma Territory, around 1903. During the first days of settlement in Taloga, members of the Dalton Gang and other outlaws are rumored to have filed land claims, using fictitious names. Farming, ranching, and oil and gas production have remained important economic drivers in western Oklahoma to the present day.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.